I saw the DF video where they discussed the speeds of the various media and the cartridge was only 400MB/s compared to over 2GB/s on Switch 2s own storage and somewhere in the middle for micro sd express. So the publishers claim Outlaws wouldn't be able to run from cartridge as the streaming speed would be too low. Streaming is such an important process in modern games. However Cyperpunk manages it well on cartridge but of course that game engine is more dated and even works on older consoles like Xbox One and PS4 from old style hard drives.
I find it interesting though that to max out performance on Switch 2 you cannot use cartridges where games play directly from the cartridge.
However I would of thought the simple solution was to move time critical code to other storage but maybe that would have been a significant amount of the overall game size.
Are Nintendo reducing the performance of their own games by keeping to physical cartridges? Could Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bonanza performed better as exclusively digital downloads or game key cards?
It seems Nintendo only providing large cartridge capacity of 64GB means it is pushing for more ambitious games on cartridge but smaller games as digital downloads or game key cards only but the reverse would seem more sensible with small games that are less ambitious on small capacity cartridges and big ambitious games avoiding physical cartridges all together.
Personally I don't consider either Mario Kart World or Donkey Kong Bonanza technically impressive even if visually pleasing graphically and very good games. I feel like Cyberpunk and Outlaws almost look like they are on a different console (a better one) admittedly though they make heavy use of DLSS where as Nintendo themselves have yet to use it for their own games.
If a game engine can't make do with streaming assets via a bandwidth of 400MB/s on a system with ~9.6gb of RAM available to it, it's poorly designed, and/or using poorly designed assets. It's offloading the cost of proper engine development to the consumer, and asking them to buy better hardware (in this case, micro sd express cards) to avoid the technical investment on their end, which they'll likely spend on marketing and countering claims to the contrary.
As someone that has made multiple game engines, 400 MB/s is insane amounts of data per second, and combined with 9.6gb of available RAM this should not be the bottleneck. Unless the engine and/or its assets are sloppily made. Too many cooks spoil the broth would be my guess.
And a related aside: If a game is dependent on an sd card's ability to stream ~1 GB/s of data constantly (or 2 GB/s internally), given that there's limited reads and writes on any solid state storage medium (external and internal), how long will that medium last? How often do you want to buy a new sd card because Ubisoft is lazy? Or have your Switch 2's internal storage replaced because this becomes the norm, to constantly stream large amounts of data unnecessarily?
Ubisoft were just making excuses to not ship the game on the cart, even if the transfer speeds are too low, they could have still put the data on there for you to install. The same thing they do with PS5/Xbox discs.
The real world difference is a few seconds in loading times, might get some parts of a game having some performance issues depending on the game. DK Bananza works absolutely fine from the cart, but waiting for Nintendo to actually release a game developed from the ground up for Switch 2 to actually see how they manage it.
That's pretty much what Nintendo did to get Breath of the Wild working on the Wii U. You had a mandatory install to the internal storage of assets that needed the faster loading speed, while the bulk of the game could still be read from the disc, where speed wasn't as critical.
Also, Switch 2 cartridges are far from slow. They're about as fast as the older SATA SSDs, even, which are still good enough to meet the minimum specs for Star Wars Outlaws on PC. At least, I can't find anything about any of them needing an NVMe drive, or specifying a minimum transfer speed.
At best, I'd think that Ubisoft saved themselves from having to do extra optimization work, allowing them to release Outlaws in a more acceptable state than typical for the company, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
However, I'll continue to question their commitment to cartridges releases until they actually make one.
@OmnitronVariant
Can we not do this "lazy developers" schtick? The XBox Series and PS5 both have incredibly high storage speeds as a key point of difference. Developers are right to have taken advantage of that by doing things like streaming large assets directly from disk rather than loading into memory
In order to port this game from platforms that had these things over to Switch 2? Yes they would have had to tune things. But the less they have to rework, redo or make compromises for the better. I know your bit is "they should make bespoke games or not release at all" but, you know, we live in the real world here where development costs money and dvelopers can choose what and how they develop. Ports from games built for PS5/XBS will happen
It's entirely possible that when running from the card they found that the game had significant hitching when moving through areas. And you might say to that they could've just reduced the asset quality further, added a loading screen or something. And this for a game that's already 1/3rd of the size of the other versions. But alternatively.... they could just not put it on the cartridge
Lastly, the dig about wear on the media and SD card from using it that heavily. Typically wear on solid state media is from writes, not reads. If it was mechanical storage you'd have a point here but it isn't so you kinda don't. I don't think this is an issue
@BonzoBanana
I don't think Nintendo is artificially reducing the speed of the game cards here. I suspect they are just the speed they are. What I will say though is that because of how flash works it's likely that the lack of smaller capacity cards is due to read speed limitations. Very probably, if they were to make smaller cards they would be even slower
The only thing that would see the Access/Read speeds are hardware/software that test for that. So unless the gap is so hughe access/read would users see a difference on Physical game cart. Only reason carts can be used is games big like STW Outlaws huge size... but if they can make 128gb exSD for that purpose that would be a nice option games would pay to have it that way. But not knowing the tech of exSD manufacturing as that isn't public we will never know the real story behind why exSD can't be 16, 32, 64 or 128 gb in size.
Doesn't seem like that many are convinced by the publishers statement and believe the game could have been cartridge based without reduced performance. The huge commercial cost of a 64GB cartridge would seem the clincher to the argument I guess. They weren't prepared to put in the huge investment into cartridge production. I do wonder though if performance would have been a bit reduced but only marginally.
If a game engine can't make do with streaming assets via a bandwidth of 400MB/s on a system
Do we have a source for that? Because I'm not sure this has been officially said anywhere. I mean, it tracks with the load benchmarking I've seen against known quantities like microSD Express speeds but I didn't know this was actually known-known.....
In any case, we're talking about porting a game that was built with a minimum platform target that have 2.4GB/s raw and upto around 5GB/s if you consider hardware decompression. Lets call that 2GB/s. It's paired back and they got it running with a better raw stability than that previous minimum target at half that. And then we're asking why they didn't ship on storage that's half that speed again
........ we can talk about corporate greed or lazy devs or whatever we want if it makes people feel better. Go for it. But it's kinda hard to dispute the facts here. The game was built around way more storage speed than Switch 2 can deliver but they got it working. And somehow people are wondering why they didn't just magically support even less storage performance when there was no technical need to
The funny part about this thread is it implies DK Bonanza and Cyberpunk 2077 are worse games than Star Wars Outlaws, lolz.
It's almost like the highest end of modern gaming tech is a bad idea if you want to actually make a great game or something. Or in this case if you want it to run well on cartridge. I'll take the great games on cartridge instead of the pointless super ultra advanced tech that will result in a game less visually interesting to me than that Yoshi game they just announced (or even Mario Kart 8 from 11 years ago tbh) and is also mid and from a maybe dying company.
@kkslider5552000 I personally don't think DK Bonanza is that technically impressive despite being a beautiful game. Cyberpunk 2077 ran on Xbox One and PS4 so its streaming processes are less demanding. Star Wars Outlaws does look technically the most impressive game so far to me. In fact comparing Star Wars Outlaws and DK Bonanza they look like they are on different consoles to me.
However how much power do you need to have a great game. The Switch has a library full of very playable games and that is a very weak format by any standard. When you look at Outlaws on Switch 2 and PS5 you can see masses of improvements on PS5 visually but how much do you care about those differences. It doesn't feel like you have lost too much. Many Switch 1 multi-platform ports ended up with a much inferior experience because of so many forced quality and performance reductions. The Switch 2 at this point is actually handling many of these games quite nicely.
As a PC gamer I will still buy those games on PC though I'll admit because the Switch 2 version is very expensive and won't be quite the full fat experience but its still super impressive to see what is achieved on the hardware. I don't know how this will continue though as later games have higher and higher CPU demands and the Switch 2 has very low CPU resources. I'm not expecting games like 'Light No Fire' to run on Switch 2 or if they do they will be severely cut down to lighten the CPU burden.
@kkslider5552000
Don't think you can make any conclusive statements about which games are "better".
But its a fact Cyberpunk on cartridge is inferior to Cyberpunk on internal storage or micro SD. The load times bear out that fact. It's also possible there is more pop in if the game streams assets from storage, which Idk if it does or not. But in Star Wars it does, ergo, even the microSD version is inferior to internal storage version. Less pop-in as it can stream assets in faster.
You can't say one game is better than another game based on its storage. But we can say a game on one storage medium is inferior to that same game on a different storage medium.
@BonzoBanana
Yes. Plain and simple. Cartridge versions ARE inferior. Thats objective, measurable, testable, verifiable fact.
In some cases the speed difference just doesn't matter for asset streaming but even then, load times are always longer on cartridges. Sometimes 25-50% longer vs internal storage. Now that may be a compromise most people can stomach in exchange for having the game on physical media given the load times are still greatly reduced compared to the previous console. But it is an aspect of the game that is inferior due to being on a cartridge.
But in other cases it does matter for streaming assets, like Star Wars. And regardless of what these random people will tell you claiming Ubisoft is "lying", it doesn't take an IQ above 140 to recognize that if a game streams assets from storage and it can only read them half as fast as internal storage, which is already 2-3x slower than other platforms' internal SSD read speeds, its going to impact the game. Pop-in will become a much bigger issue, draw distances would need to be drastically reduced, visual fidelity would ultimately take a hit...
People don't want to admit it because they are emotionally attached to physical media. But the cold hard truth of the matter is yes, physical media has become a bottleneck and will ultimately need to die in order for games to continue to advance.
Its not that the tech doesnt exist for carts to have adequate read speeds, its that the cost is prohibitive. Even the current speeds are expensive as all heck.
So I think cartridges are fine for most games as long as you are okay with load times being a little bit longer, but there are going to be some games that would be too compromised on a cart or flat out wouldn't run well enough to satisfy expectations.
Man, as someone that's worked on numerous game engines, it's incredible to see the certainty with which you people claim to know what's necessary for asset streaming tech. And then throwing around claims of IQ on top. Classic.
Through all of this, we’re forgetting that the same employee said Outlaws certainly could have been made to run on Switch 2 from the physical cart, but they would have needed more time.
Don't think you can make any conclusive statements about which games are "better".
Yes you can! Otherwise, don't bother having any discussions on subjective opinion on a personal or wider fan/critical scale at all. The consensus is that Star Wars Outlaws is a worse game, and to many, by some distance! There is nothing I said that would even fit the unpopular gaming opinion thread, I dare say! (which to be fair, also describes at least 1/3 of the unpopular gaming opinion thread, but oh well)
Tbh, based on how good it apparently is, FFVIIR would be a better port for this discussion on the basis that its a game that's actually great or worth buying or worth spending your time in the one life you have to bother experiencing in any way. At least that's a game where I would be tempted to...well not buy a game key card, that's cringe, but I would consider buying it digitally because its an apparently impressive port of a game worth buying.
Of course the funny thing about this is non-zero chance something like when Limited Run games published retail versions of the Switch ports of Doom Eternal and Alien Isolation happens, especially if Nintendo does more than one type of cartridge in the future. Nothing would be funnier than them doing it with this game.
@kkslider5552000
Yea my resolve against key cards is gonna be tested early next year when FFVII comes out.
I’ve wanted to play that game for so long, but I don’t know how long it’s gonna take for someone to do a full physical version. I do think it’s inevitable for a game like that, but sometimes it can take quite awhile.
People don't want to admit it because they are emotionally attached to physical media. But the cold hard truth of the matter is yes, physical media has become a bottleneck and will ultimately need to die in order for games to continue to advance.
Aaaaaannnnndddd there's where I have a problem with that quote. Not gonna argue but I think that it tells me I need to get away from this site pronto before I get triggered. End of story. Not gonna embrace digital and never will.
I sell my famous Chesapeake Tupperware.
I ACCEPT NO DEBIT CARDS!
DO YOU HEAR ME!?!
I didn't even read that. Nah, people need to realize that technology itself is limiting games (or at least the companies that still bother to use high end gaming tech are doing things in such a way that that is what is happening). If I could play a great game in a year+ shorter amount of time from a smaller team, that still looks great and is less bloated/compromised of being interesting by a marketing team scared of a game selling less than 15 million that's on an actual cartridge, wtf do you think I'm gonna choose?
Imagine choosing a Ubisoft slop game to justify AAA game choices in 2025. I mean no disrespect to the people who actually worked on the game, but cmon. Just a week or two after Hollow Knight: Silksong broke all the online game stores. We don't need this anymore. This is unnecessary. The example disproves the argument.
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Topic: Are games that have the full game on cartridge inferior?
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